An Exercise in Calculating Energy Use and Swinging Hammers Delivers A Much-needed Addition to Cottage City Community Garden.
Bee shed being moved
Image Credit: Dave Tilley
On a warm, sunny day near Washington, D.C., a covey of bees tends to the flowers of a much-loved community garden. The tiny creatures gather the pollen and leave behind dustings from one flower to the next, undisturbed by the rumbling of a nearby train vibrating in the air.
Collectively, the bees will fly nearly 15 million km in a year, seeking out the bounty that their sisters will convert into honey to supply the entire hive with energy. When people collect the sweet golden surplus, the whole system of energy collection and transformation is 2 ½ times more efficient than the production system for refined sugar.
Of course, the bees don’t need to know this, and neither do the residents of Cottage City, Maryland, who tend to their hives. They just know that since they started keeping bees about five years ago, the harvest in their garden has gone up.
What hasn’t increased over those years is the space the Cottage City beekeepers need to store their equipment and do their work--which has made that system rather inefficient. Until now.
Under the guidance of Dave Tilley, an associate professor of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, a cohort of undergraduate students designed, built, and delivered a beautiful new shed, which now stands adjacent to the community’s four bee hives. Complete with a solar-powered system for lighting and charging weed whacker batteries and cellphones, the bee shed was the end product of Tilley’s class ENST 405 – Energy and Environment.
Most of the students had never swung a hammer before, but they were acutely aware of the energy they spent with every thwack of a nail. In fact, they had a calculation for it, along with calculations for the energy that had gone into producing and shipping the plywood and roofing material, how much energy was produced by the solar panels, and how the temperature inside the shed would change throughout the day depending on the insulation.
“That was the goal of the class, to learn about energy modeling and environmental accounting,” said Tilley. The physical building of the shed was a hands-on way for the students to see their bookwork applied in the real world.
“I think everybody was a little intimidated by building the shed at first,” said class participant Muqarib T. Anwar, a senior environmental science and technology major with an eco-tech concentration. “But internally, I was excited, because I’ve always wanted to take a hands-on course. I want to go into either sustainable agriculture, urban sustainability, or ecosystem restoration, and I feel that everything that I've learned from this class is going to be very valuable.”
When Anwar and his classmates did an analysis of the energy it took to make the shed and the energy expected out of it, they determined it would produce a net gain in two years. But of course, the shed was donated to Cottage City, so the town started gaining benefits right away. And according to Denise Hamler, a co-leader of the community garden, the donation couldn’t have come at a better moment.
“When Dave [Tilley] reached out to me, we had just gotten a grant from our town to upgrade some of our infrastructure, and we were planning to purchase a new shed,” Hamler said. “Bees are very equipment intensive—smokers, bee suits, frames for hives. Our volunteer beekeepers were keeping these things in their basements and at the town hall. It was just getting to be quite a mess. We knew we had to consolidate all our equipment in one place.”
With the donation of the shed, the community can now use its funds for other projects. And there is no shortage of those. The garden is a busy gathering space that hosts educational and social events for a culturally diverse mix of residents living along the Northeast border of Washington D.C. and there is always something going on.
“This garden is known as a model sustainability garden,” Hamler said. “We have tours to teach people about things like our rain collection systems, and we have events every month, like salsa in the garden, sip & paint, and pumpkin picking for the kids.”
And of course, lush green rows of organic vegetables that help feed their urban community and support a thriving population of pollinators.
“Knowing that this class project is going to be used and benefit a local community has been really fun,” said Masha Berezina, a junior who counts this class among her most memorable UMD experiences. “This is something that’s going to stick with me. Just learning how to hammer a nail into a wall and learning about green energy and R-value calculations, and how to read the different diagrams while also building, it just helped bring it all together and make it more applicable, both for my major and for my life.”
And all the while, the bees just keep going about their business, unaware of the energy it takes to keep them happy.
